Chances Are . . .: Adventures in Probability

Chances Are . . .: Adventures in Probability

Michael Kaplan

Language: English

Pages: 336

ISBN: 0143038346

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub

A compelling journey through history, mathematics, and philosophy, charting humanity’s struggle against randomness

Our lives are played out in the arena of chance. However little we recognize it in our day-to-day existence, we are always riding the odds, seeking out certainty but settling—reluctantly—for likelihood, building our beliefs on the shadowy props of probability. Chances Are is the story of man’s millennia-long search for the tools to manage the recurrent but unpredictable—to help us prevent, or at least mitigate, the seemingly random blows of disaster, disease, and injustice. In these pages, we meet the brilliant individuals who developed the first abstract formulations of probability, as well as the intrepid visionaries who recognized their practical applications—from gamblers to military strategists to meteorologists to medical researchers, from blackjack to our own mortality.

hotter, the pressure goes up everywhere within it), then authorship is also a constraint with statistical validity. Shakespeare’s average entropy should not be the same as Bacon’s; Virgil’s concision is not Ovid’s. Perhaps this explains why we seem to recognize the hand of the maker even in an unfamiliar work: we don’t confuse a previously unseen van Gogh with a Gauguin; Bach is indisputably Bach within the first few bars; a glance distinguishes classical architecture from neoclassical. The

Europe’s greatest Baroque city. John Evelyn, Christopher Wren’s colleague on the redevelopment committee, had visions of an Italianate capital of piazzas, boulevards, and an esplanade along the river—but to create this would be to ignore the rights of individual property holders, before which a British government (then, at least) was powerless. John Ogilby was commissioned to make a map, 52 inches to the mile, of the devastated area: ironically, the very first accurate plan of any city in the

numbers; and as a field general, he understood supply. Facts captivated him, and numbers gave him control over facts. “If you want to interest him,” said a contemporary, “quote a statistic.” The uniformity in society established by the Revolution in the name of fraternity became a uniformity of administration, the lever with which Napoleon—or any government—could move the world. Hydra-headed, multifarious, legion—it is significant that philosophers have used the same adjectives to castigate the

weight of the parent seed, but subtly shifted toward the mean weight of the whole parent population. Heavy seed bred heavy seeds—but, on average, a little lighter than their parents; the descendents of light seeds were, on average, heavier—more “normal” from the point of view of their parents’ generation. Galton called this “regression to the mean,” and—while it may not explain why the children of hippie parents grow up to vote Republican, it makes the phenomenon slightly less surprising. Struck